LET THE DEAD BURY THEIR DEAD

Luke ix. 60

Where marshes venom-steeped the life-breeze taint

And fitful meteors lap the watery wild,

A moon sinks in the cloud-mire, dazed and faint,

Its pearly flush defiled,

Halo’d in sallow vapours like a saint

Through paths impure beguiled.

But worse the gloom within the castle walls

Where moans the lord whom pestilence devours:

The serfs awe-stricken flee his festering halls,

The plague-star o’er him lowers,

On his glazed eyes the fatal glimmer falls

While night weighs down his towers.

A crescent moon whose advent stays the pest

Embalms the dead with heavenly obsequies,

But there are none to bear him to his rest,

His body shroudless lies;

Anointed not, by pious rites unblest,

Unto the grave he cries.

153A great half-moon now dominates the dome,

With stern upbraidings yet not less benign:

But the blank gazers to his final home

The dead dare not consign,

Lured on by sullen spectres of the gloam

Who their own dead enshrine.

Again the drowsy marshes pillow night

And darkness severs sky and earth in two,

But with a rush of cloud dispersing might

A full moon hurries through;

The corpse is shrouded as in living light,

The castle walls look new.

The heaven is one blue wave; it seems to break

While lucid spray with dreamlight floods the air:

The coffins in the quickened graveyards quake,

The bones know they are there,

And ghostly shades their buried depths forsake

To gather in the glare.

As dusk descends, by its scared rays illumed,

A soul-procession dense and denser grows:

Hearse after hearse night-horsed and sable-plumed

A mirage heavenward throws:

The newly dead is by the dead entombed

And nature has repose.

154